A review by nmcannon
A Woman's Place Is in the Brewhouse: A Forgotten History of Alewives, Brewsters, Witches, and CEOs by Tara Nurin

informative fast-paced

2.0

When I saw A Woman’s Place Is In The Brewhouse on the library shelf, I grabbed it immediately. My wife and mother-in-law are brewers, and I was excited to learn the history of both their hobby and a cornerstone of human culture. Since I turned the first page, I wanted to like this book. Ultimately, however, the confusing structure left me disappointed.

Focusing almost exclusively on the Pacific Northwest and California after Prohibition, Nurin organized by eras and then topics or trends within those eras. I had no trouble following the chronology–partners and friends brewing together in an industrial shed slowly morphed into corporate industry. Topics were the trouble. Instead of following people, Nurin wrote various permutations on a trend. A whole chapter would be dedicated to, say, marketing beer. Different marketing methods, reactions to those methods, and resulting problems with those methods would be listed out, with names occasionally popped in as an example. This stylistic choice made it incredibly difficult to follow any individual brewer. For a book supposedly putting women in the forefront of brewing history for the first time, it’s crushing that I couldn’t name a single lady brewer after the last page.

Speaking of the book’s feminism, it’s heavily second wave and separatist. Women are framed as better than men, women would be better off without men sucking up all their time and energy, and heterosexual relationships lead to heartbreak. Brewers of color were discussed, but not at length. Queer and/or disabled brewers are ??? Presumably somewhere. Patriarchy harms everyone, regardless of gender, and it’s only going to be defeated if we all work together.

All that being said, Nurin convinced me of the patriarchal poison in the beer industry and the revisionism of history, often out of negligence. A women brewer-focused history book needs to exist. I’m hoping there’s a second edition of this one, or another writer takes up the cause.